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The Woman No Hat Could Tame

NOT FADE AWAY Isabella Blow stopped traffic with her outrageous getups. She was a friend to many in the fashion world, including the milliner Philip Treacy, right, and Hedi Slimane, at left. Credit
Bill Cunningham/The New York Times

ISABELLA BLOW, the English eccentric and sorcerer of talent who died this week, was a completely implausible figure. You could not explain her and you could not reason with her. She was incredibly bright on the subject of fashion and rarefied tastes, a fact she wore on her sleeve and on her head. She loved a bustle, a corseted waist and a spectacular hat. And not for her the mushy-pea variety, the Ascot bonnet.

Her hats were the big-game kind, trophies of her wit and imagination: a veiled set of antlers, a jewel-encrusted lobster, a sailing ship, a pheasant. Her more exotic choices of headgear could be attributed to an aesthetic link with her paternal grandmother, Lady Vera Delves Broughton, an explorer and hunter, who claimed to have supped on a tribesman in Papua New Guinea. “She wasn’t strictly a cannibal,” her granddaughter pointed out.

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Z. Tomaszewski/Wenn/Newscom

But try to remind Izzy, as she was called, during one of her periodic financial crises that even aristocratic eccentrics had to occasionally go out and earn a living, and she would laugh her deep honking laugh and say, “Oh, honey...”

Although Izzy worked regularly as a fashion editor, at different times for British Vogue, The Sunday Times and Tatler, and intermittently as a consultant to companies like Swarovski, she had, in a sense, no clear role. And that was a problem for her.

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J. Almasi/Uppa-Zuma Press/Newscom

“Nobody knew how to quantify her talent,” said her friend Daphne Guinness, whose great-grandfather knew Ms. Blow’s grandmother. She was definitely the catalyst to the designer Alexander McQueen and the milliner Philip Treacy, her all-consuming belief in their talent that of a patron. Though, as Ms. Guinness said: “She could ill afford to be that. People took it for granted that because she came from a certain type of background she had money. She didn’t have that kind of support, though she could spend her last penny helping someone.”

Michael Roberts, the fashion director of Vanity Fair, took on Ms. Blow as his assistant at Tatler in the mid-1980s and remained close to her until the last months of her life. Recalling her discovery of Mr. McQueen, in the early ’90s, Mr. Roberts said: “She rang me up and said, ‘You’ve got to see this guy’s clothing.’ Then she dragged me off to a basement in Piccadilly, a smelly basement. But she was absolutely right.”

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Her party headgear included an octopus hat, with a lobster necklace.Credit
Bill Cunningham/The New York Times

In both appearance and expectations she belonged very much, one felt, to a different time. “She was the most interesting person I ever met,” Mr. Treacy said this week in The Guardian. Though English newspapers and magazines typically have small budgets, Ms. Blow invariably stayed at the most expensive hotels. “She went over budget because she didn’t have any conception of budget,” said Jonathan Newhouse, who oversees the Condé Nast magazines in Europe and Asia.

As Ms. Guinness said, “She had that kind of extravagant, ’30s idea of money.” She traveled with numerous pieces of luggage, including hatboxes. Recalling a trip they made together to Kuwait for a photo shoot, Ms. Guinness said: “We were in Terminal 4 at Heathrow. I’m not someone who fades into the background, either, but Izzy looked like a highwayman.” She had on a cape and tricorn.

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A horned creation for a do at Madame Tussauds in London.Credit
Z. Tomaszewski/Wenn/Newscom

Although Ms. Blow was an exceptionally cultivated woman, at ease with a baroness or a shopgirl, she advanced toward things with a kind of willful cluelessness. In Kuwait, oblivious of Islamic laws, she put models in bikinis. “Suddenly people came out of nowhere with guns at us,” Ms. Guinness said. “She was so nonplussed.”

For a cameo appearance in Wes Anderson’s “Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou,” she fretted, according to her friend Ronnie Newhouse, that she would be nervous and asked one of the actors if he had ever “done this kind of thing before.” It was Bill Murray.

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Bill Cunningham/The New York Times

But it was difficult for Ms. Blow to find a home in a world she influenced. She was upset that Mr. McQueen didn’t take her along when he sold his brand to Gucci, though they remained good friends. “She functioned outside the corporate world,” Ms. Guinness said. “Once the deals started happening, she fell by the wayside. Everybody else got contracts, and she got a free dress.”

It may be that she didn’t know how to ask for a position, Ms. Guinness said. “But getting that kind of acknowledgment would have given her esteem. She poured all of that esteem into other people, but had none of her own.”

In the last year, Ms. Blow suffered from serious depression, attempting suicide at least twice, according to her friends. Last May she jumped from a highway overpass, breaking both legs. She remained, in a sense, valiantly Izzy, pointing out to her friends that she had been dressed to the nines, and in her hospital room smoking inside a cupboard, “as if somebody wouldn’t notice it,” Ms. Guinness said.

While the Newhouses took care of many of her medical bills, and her friends did what they could do to help her, she became more and more remote, convinced that she would end up as a bag lady. Nothing could make her see the beauty in things the way she once had, turning the fashion world on its ear.